In a world where Others play with mortal lives, in a hidden province that survives on the backs of abducted slaves, Isabella, one of those stolen folk, sends a message woven into rare cloth made of paper and silk, in the vain hope that her cousin will find it, decipher it and rescue her.
This is the first chapter of my W.I.P. It is unedited and raw and I offer it up for any comment. It takes place in the secretive Han province in the fantasy world of Eirie. Prue Batten © 2010
Chapter One
I am trying so hard to motivate self to click on my writing file and begin to re-read as much as I have written of The Shifu Cloth. The trouble is that I have a velvety voice in my ear right now. He’s telling me the story of Venetia and I am hard-put to think that reading my own un-edited prose would be better.
The idea of holding a blog event would have sounded quite odd to me twelve months ago. 
That long ago I was only just coming to terms with Facebook and LinkedIn, followed by the dreaded 140 characters of Twitter. But on the lookout for ways in which to reach a readership, I came across ‘how to make a book-trailer’ on Nathan Bransford’s blog. Of course I couldn’t on my own, because technology and I don’t speak in the same language and so my brother (who runs a production house) did it to my brief. After that I felt ‘challenge’ biting at my heels and on reading all my favourite historical fiction blogs, came across the amaaaaazzzing vvb32 who seems to run brilliant events on a weekly basis.
I’m finding guilt weighs heavily. I had such plans this summer . . . to at least have written the first draft of The Shifu Cloth. I’m 60,000 words in and finding the flow tremendously difficult and I know why. I’ve been editing an earlier novel, writing short stories and marketing and contributing bits to the ongoing Masked Ball story.
Sometimes the oddest things inspire, arriving in one’s life at just the right time. I’m working on the first draft of a fantasy fiction at the moment, entitled The Shifu Cloth. Part of it takes place in a Far Eastern inspired country called The Han. My female protagonist, Isabella, meets a character at the time of the Lantern Festival which heralds Spring. And I wondered what this character should look like . . . clothes, mannerisms etc. I had done much research on China and Japan but the research pressed no buttons. And then my dearest embroidery friend gave me a notebook (see left) and suddenly my dilemma was solved. This was my character . . . except in the story, I have given him glasses. He needed to appear myopic and studious, as well as inscrutable and I’ve always liked the way occasionally light shines on rimless spectacles, effectively blocking out eye expression.
A few months ago, Writer Unboxed had a discussion on the advisability or not of creating names and languages in fantasy. There’s no doubt that Tolkein was the master. But I have put more fantasies by other authors back on the shop-shelves than I have bought, simply because many of the names and languages read like a Scrabble box of letters. My feeling for what it is worth is that the English language, ancient and modern, has a mammoth reservoir of words into which one can delve. In addition, if a fantasy author chooses to model parts of their world on a specific culture, I feel it’s more than okay to pilfer the odd foreign word and use it for one’s own needs. As a reader though, I need to be able to roll words around like a lozenge and taste them. It’s an idiosyncracy and one I use in my own writing.
